(Image: reve.art) 
A small item crossed my screen this week. It was an announcement from a US bank called SoFi that it was launching a facility to allow its customers to trade crypto directly through the bank’s interface and under the bank’s management. SoFi is a medium-sized bank (not even in the top 100). Much more importantly, it is not a regional or state bank. It is nationally chartered, which is a big deal. It is the first nationally chartered bank in the US to offer crypto trading to its retail customers.
The dyke has been breached. The walls are going to crumble swiftly now.
Why? Because of all the barriers to crypto adoption (the tech itself, the opportunists, password phishers and rug pullers, the derision of economists and the overreaction of regulators), none is higher than its user-unfriendliness. Even for those who wanted to dip a toe into the water, the jagged edges of crypto wallets, private and public keys, gas, blockchain explorers and other jargon have served as a near-impermeable barrier to entry for all but the most technologically literate of players.
There was no customer support to call if something went wrong. No bank stepping you patiently through the process. No carefully articulated product descriptions. No brand offering its legacy trust to you (albeit for a fee). In short, no handholding of any kind.
Now, a nationally chartered bank with $36-billion (R680-billion) in deposits is saying to its customers, “We believe that crypto is a legitimate investment option. If you want to test the waters, we’ve got your back.”
Which brings me to Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). It is not only the most successful venture capital company in recent history, but perhaps, as importantly, is the most articulate voice for the future of tech — as made manifest in frequent podcasts, blogs and research reports by numerous research analysts throughout the company.
Not only does it get to the beating heart of tech’s potential futures quickly, but it also has access to the most interesting global entrepreneurs and innovators across multiple technologies, and so its guest list is broad and deep. Just listening to its podcasts and nothing else will give anyone a reasonably good idea of where the world of advanced technology is heading.
So, there is usually great anticipation every year when Andreessen Horowitz releases its “State of…” reports, which cast an analytic eye over the past year for some sector in which they have an interest.
It recently released its State of Crypto 2025 report. A pithy observation was made by the host, Robert Hackett, at the beginning of a podcast covering the report: blockchains are now 17 years old, with the original Bitcoin white paper having been released in October 2008. Same age as an unruly teenager about to step into the responsibilities of adulthood.
Fair analogy.
Better alternatives
The report is long, festooned with all manner of charts and graphs. The conclusions are not that complex, though: every pillar in the financial arena is now being replaced by better blockchain alternatives. Here are some takeaways:
Stablecoins now move more money annually than Visa and Mastercard combined, at nearly $46-trillion in the past year. They are the dollar’s digital twin, now issued against more than 1% of total dollars in circulation and growing fast. They’ve become a new form of Treasury demand, the world’s 17th-largest holder of US government debt. That’s not a sideshow, that’s a second monetary system running in parallel, faster, cheaper and borderless.
The financial institutions, of course, joined in. BlackRock, JPMorgan, Visa, PayPal, Stripe — once reluctant, now fully invested. Their consumer products quietly settle using crypto rails. If you’ve moved money across borders recently, there’s a fair chance it touched a blockchain — even if you never noticed. Every major bank in the world is now sprinting to get on board this train. Stablecoins, each one essentially a digital and easily transacted title deed for a dollar (or other currency), are no longer suspicious interlopers into the monetary system; they are an upgrade.
The report also covers tokenisation — the creation of blockchain-based crypto tokens representing an ownership claim on something (anything) in the real world. The tokens can be securely housed and traded quickly and effortlessly on-chain. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (the world’s largest investment house), recently said that we’re merely “at the beginning of the tokenisation of all assets, from real estate to equity to bonds, across the board”.
The a16z report points out that what began as a DeFi (decentralised finance) experiment in 2023, putting treasuries and loans on-chain, has now become a global capital market worth $30-billion, quadrupling in two years. Institutional investors are finding they can clear and settle instantly, avoiding middlemen and audit holdings in real time. The middle layers of finance — the clearing houses, custodians and registrars — are starting to look like species on the edge of extinction.
And then there’s the other stuff. The long-awaited arrival of non-kneejerk, carefully considered regulation like the US Genius and Clarity Acts. The emergence of real-value-accruing crypto token projects, such as Helium, which rewards citizens for sharing their personal Wi-Fi routers with a nationally decentralised network of others. The scaling up of blockchain transaction speeds from “too-slow-to-be-taken-seriously” to many thousands of transactions per second. The arrival of crypto-secured micropayments into agentic AI systems that can pay 3 cents for an article you may want to read.
In short, the blockchain is quickly becoming the new operating system of the global financial ecosystem.
So what happens when the upgrade finishes installing?
Traditional finance won’t vanish; it’ll quietly migrate, wrapped in new code, rebuilt for a machine-speed world. The names on the doors might still say JPMorgan or Mastercard, but the plumbing underneath will hum with blockchains.
That’s the quiet punchline of 2025: crypto didn’t overthrow the creaking machinery of traditional finance. It just pushed it towards obsolescence, and nobody will even notice when it’s sent out to pasture. DM
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg, a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.